When I lived in Africa, New Guinea, the Solomons, Burma, Borneo, Iran, Samoa, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, anywhere far away from a good bookshop, my first question of any other expatriate I encountered was, "Do you have any interesting books to read?"
To this day, when I travel I carry a small collection of books with me. Some of these books help me patch up the holes in my literary education while on holidays and which I feel obliged to cart home again. Others are books which, like shampoo bottles or slips of hotel soap, I won't mind giving away to fellow-travellers or locals.
I believe it's a small courtesy to leave holiday reading in your wake, no matter what it cost you, to sail through a strange country, discarding books for those following or left behind, with your book-bag getting lighter as you go.
W. Somerset Maugham in his short story "The Book-Bag" equated the need for books to the addict's need for drugs. He could not conceive of why a traveler might venture out without a large supply of reading material at the ready. Having learned his lesson once while imprisoned by illness in a hill-town in Java without enough to read, he carried a giant laundry bag of books with him everywhere in his travels through colonial outposts. Without that book bag, he would "never had heard the singular history of Olive Hardy" of which you may wish to read here:
"Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-smoker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores or Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful hours over both these works. At one time I never went out without a second-hand bookseller's list in my pocket. I know no reading more fruity. Of course to read in this way is as reprehensible as doping, and I never cease to wonder at the impertinence of great readers who, because they are such, look down on the illiterate. From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows? Let us admit that reading with us is just a drug that we cannot do without - who of this band does not know the restlessness that attacks him when he has been severed from reading too long, the apprehension and irritability, and the sigh of relief which the sight of a printed page extracts from him? - and so let us be no more vainglorious than the poor slaves of the hypodermic needle or the pint-pot." click here to continue ...
So you're hooked on W. Somerset Maugham's short stories, are you? Well, go on, read some more:
Page 13 Rain
Page 40 The Fall of Edward Barnard
Page 62 Honolulu
Page 78 The Ant and the Grasshopper
Page 81 The Pool
Page 106 Mackintosh
Page 128 The Three Fat Women of Antibes
Page 138 The Facts of Life
Page 151 Gigolo and Gigolette
Page 163 The Voice of the Turtle
Page 174 The Unconquered
Page 192 The Escape
Page 195 Mr Know-All
Page 200 The Romantic Young Lady
Page 207 A Man from Glasgow
Page 214 Before the Partyy
Page 231 The Vessel of Wrath
Page 256 Louise
Page 261 The Promise
Page 266 The Yellow Streak
Page 284 The Force of Circumstance
Page 301 Flotsam and Jetsam
Page 317 The Alien Corn
Page 342 The Creative Impulse
Page 365 Virtue
Page 389 The Closed Shop
Page 395 The Dream
Page 398 The Colonel's Lady
Page 410 Miss King
Page 432 The Hairless Mexican
Page 456 The Traitor
Page 479 His Excellency
Page 500 Mr Harrington's Washing
Page 525 Lord Mountdrago
Page 541 Sanatorium
Page 557 The Social Sense
Page 563 The Verger
Page 568 The Taipan
Page 573 The Consul
Page 577 A Friend in Need
Page 581 The Round Dozen
Page 599 The Human Element
Page 622 Jane
Page 639 Footprints in the Jungle
Page 659 The Door of Opportunity
Page 681 The Book-bag
Page 705 French Joe
Page 708 The Four Dutchmen
Page 713 The Back of Beyond
Page 734 P.&O.
Page 755 Episode
Page 769 The Kite
Page 785 A Woman of Fifty
Page 797 The Lotus Eater
Page 808 The Wash-Tub
Page 814 A Man with a Conscience
Page 827 Winter Cruise
Page 839 A Marriage of Convenience
Page 848 Mirage
Page 861 The Letter
Page 883 The Portrait of a Gentleman
Page 887 Raw Material
Page 890 Straight Flush
Page 894 A Casual Affair
Page 908 Neil MacAdam
